Toronto Review: My Days of Mercy Is a Strange Bird, But a Compelling One

The 2017 Toronto International Film Festival’s press and industry screening of My Days of Mercy was marked by streams of people getting up and leaving early. They were wrong to do so; there is a lot to like about this film, predominantly the performances, even if the mechanics of this story are likely to inspire a hearty “oh, please!”

Ellen Page, who is outstanding in an extremely difficult role, is Lucy, a young woman we first meet in a ratty T-shirt and pilled-up old hoodie. Early on, she locks eyes with a prim blonde in a sundress (Kate Mara), and there’s a spark. The girl’s name is (hold on to something now) Mercy, and this instant smitten-ing comes at a very unusual place: outside the prison where an inmate is about to be executed.

Lucy, her older sister Martha (Amy Seimetz), and their younger squirt brother Ben (Charlie Shotwell) have driven all night in an RV, and are there with other hippies to protest the immorality of capital punishment. Mercy and her religious family are there representing a support group for victim’s families—basically a roving band of death penalty supporters.

This specific lethal injection hits closer to home: the mentally-challenged man about to die killed a police officer, her father’s longtime partner. Soon we’ll discover that there’s a built-in bookend to this story: four months from now, Lucy’s father is scheduled to die as well.

He’s been convicted of killing Lucy’s mother, but his children are convinced he didn’t do it. At least, Martha certainly is. Lucy doesn’t really know what to believe, and Ben was just a baby when the murder happened; he has never actually met the man. But there’s a lot of discovery that’s going to occur over the next four months—especially between Lucy and Mercy, who, despite their (very specific) political differences, quickly fall in love.

It’s a cute romance at times, but completely preposterous. The two scheme to meet one another at “the next one”—the parking lots of whichever Missouri or Virginia prison is next scheduled to pull the switch. Mercy is the more forward party in the relationship, the sort of character who makes the sexy lip-synch moments that seem to be an indie film requirement; sure, she’s a little one-dimensional, but the film will have you rooting for Lucy to find happiness with her all the same.

Seimetz is also terrific (and terrifically sad) as Martha, a depleted surrogate mother and father who finds some comfort in sleeping with her father’s young attorney. (“Pro-boner work,” Lucy snidely comments.) This is a movie where physical intimacy is a final lifeline to people so beaten down they have nothing left. Naturally, everyone is overwhelmingly bummed-out most of the time.

My Days of Mercy was directed by Tali Shalom-Ezer, whose last film, the Hebrew-language Princess, was far stranger and darker than this. (It dealt with doppelgangers and incest.) But both have a great deal of compassion for their characters. By the third act of Mercy, Shalom-Ezer is unafraid to let her actors cut loose in a series of scenes that really work. Her camera doesn’t call attention to itself (save for some “last meal” establishing shots that have not one, but two brilliant pay-offs), but she does make some sharp choices, like easing into tension-building hand-held sequences before a viewer will even realize the change has happened. Most effective, and, unfortunately relatable, is how the film spotlights good people navigating their daily lives as they count down the time a loved one has left. Despite the peculiarity of mixing and issue-oriented political film with an LGBT coming-of-age story, it is ultimately a very powerful, emotional, and universal story.

Gary Oldman

Immediately after Darkest Hour’s Telluride premiere Gary Oldman rocketed to the top of Oscars’ best-actor race for his performance as Winston Churchill during World War II. The naturally slender Oldman spent four hours a day in a makeup chair and wore prosthetics equal to half his body weight to play the garrulous and heavy-set British prime minister in Joe Wright’s film. Oldman, who was nominated for an Oscar his 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, came to the Churchill role reluctantly, believing he was unsuited for it physically. “I just needed to tell him he was the only man for the job, that he could do it,” Wright said of Oldman. “And I knew he could, cause he’s a genius.”

Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Ben Mendelsohn

Ben Mendelsohn plays the gentle King George VI to Gary Oldman’s rough and rousing Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’sDarkest Hour, which premiered to rousing applause at the mountain festival. An Australian actor best known in Hollywood for his work playing villains like Rogue One’s Director Krennic, Mendelsohn found pleasure in a character on the right side of history. “[The role] was a very unexpected gift given everything I’ve been doing recently,” Mendelsohn said. “I thought its was very bold. It was against the vogue of what had been going on.”

Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Angelina Jolie, Loung Ung, Sreymoch Sareum, and Kimhak Mun

When introducing her new film, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, before a screening, director Angelina Jolie said that, as she sees it, it isn’t her film at all. Instead it belongs to the people of Cambodia, a nation that is in many ways just beginning to grapple with the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Fittingly, then, Jolie ceded the stage to Loung Ung, whose wartime memoir is the basis of the film, and to two of the young actors, Sreymoch Sareum and Kimhak Mun, who play the children at the center of the harrowing work-camp story. A bond between director, subject, and actors was immediately evident. The film received heaps of praise, and could be Netflix’s first serious Oscars contender.

Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy

As the Telluride Film Festival’s directors, Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy are the hosts who set the Rocky Mountain event’s warm tone and high bar for cinema. During the year, they screen some 200 features for consideration on their tightly curated slate, mining for the film gems that will often surge to the front of the Oscar race. Luddy, who was among the festival’s original founders in 1974, walks the town as Telluride’s spiritual godfather. Huntsinger, who came aboard in 2007, manages a festival weekend staff of roughly 500 people, and endeavors to maintain the intimacy of the festival’s early years. “I was given the keys to this new, beautiful, very complex mansion,” Huntsinger said. “You take care of this, you look after it.”

Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Gary Oldman

Immediately after Darkest Hour’s Telluride premiere Gary Oldman rocketed to the top of Oscars’ best-actor race for his performance as Winston Churchill during World War II. The naturally slender Oldman spent four hours a day in a makeup chair and wore prosthetics equal to half his body weight to play the garrulous and heavy-set British prime minister in Joe Wright’s film. Oldman, who was nominated for an Oscar his 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, came to the Churchill role reluctantly, believing he was unsuited for it physically. “I just needed to tell him he was the only man for the job, that he could do it,” Wright said of Oldman. “And I knew he could, cause he’s a genius.”

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Ben Mendelsohn

Ben Mendelsohn plays the gentle King George VI to Gary Oldman’s rough and rousing Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’sDarkest Hour, which premiered to rousing applause at the mountain festival. An Australian actor best known in Hollywood for his work playing villains like Rogue One’s Director Krennic, Mendelsohn found pleasure in a character on the right side of history. “[The role] was a very unexpected gift given everything I’ve been doing recently,” Mendelsohn said. “I thought its was very bold. It was against the vogue of what had been going on.”

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Angelina Jolie, Loung Ung, Sreymoch Sareum, and Kimhak Mun

When introducing her new film, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, before a screening, director Angelina Jolie said that, as she sees it, it isn’t her film at all. Instead it belongs to the people of Cambodia, a nation that is in many ways just beginning to grapple with the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Fittingly, then, Jolie ceded the stage to Loung Ung, whose wartime memoir is the basis of the film, and to two of the young actors, Sreymoch Sareum and Kimhak Mun, who play the children at the center of the harrowing work-camp story. A bond between director, subject, and actors was immediately evident. The film received heaps of praise, and could be Netflix’s first serious Oscars contender.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Barry Jenkins

Telluride is proud of all of its children, but perhaps none more so at the moment than writer-director Barry Jenkins, who first came to the festival as a student and then served on the staff for years. In 2016, Jenkins’s Telluride narrative came full circle, as his film Moonlight made its world premiere on the first night of the weekend. It later went on to win three Academy Awards, including a screenplay award for Jenkins and best picture. Though now an internationally lauded filmmaker, Jenkins has not gotten too big to help out at the festival. This year, he programmed a series of shorts and passionately introduced Greta Gerwig’s buzzed-about directorial debut, Lady Bird. No doubt Jenkins will be back again next year, as children of Telluride are nothing if not loyal.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Jamie Bell

We’ve seen Jamie Bell do ballet, become a hulking superhero, take up arms against both the Nazis and the colonial British, and go an epic C.G.I. adventure as Tintin. But we hadn’t really seen him as a romantic lead until Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, a wistful memory piece that premiered at Telluride this year. Bell plays a young man who falls in love with much older actress Gloria Grahame, played by Annette Bening. Throughout, Bell proves a dashing, sympathetic leading man, holding the center of the movie with poise and understatement. Little Billy Elliot has grown up, but remains as talented as ever. Hopefully Hollywood will take notice and give Bell more opportunities to show us what he can do. What better place to launch a career’s next phase than in Telluride?

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Emma Stone and Billie Jean King

When Emma Stone took the stage at the world premiere of Battle of the Sexes, she got an eager round of applause. When Billie Jean King walked out, she got a standing ovation. The mood in the room remained effusive as the film screened, the rousing sports drama proving an effective crowd-pleaser that has some allegorical ties to recent political events. The resounding response at Telluride could indicate strong Oscar fortunes for the film, especially for Stone, who embodies King’s tenacity and turmoil with heart and intensity. Most importantly, though, it’s a long overdue testament to a dedicated athlete and champion of women’s rights.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Richard Jenkins

This year the journeyman actor Richard Jenkins traveled to Telluride with a big movie. He plays one of the lonely hearts whose lives are changed by a Black Lagoon-esque creature in Guillermo del Toro’s exquisite monster horror-romance The Shape of Water. It’s the kind of supporting turn that could get the attention of the Academy: poignant, funny, and utterly essential to the film. Regardless of his awards chances, Jenkins turned in one of the best performances at a very stacked festival, reminding us why so many top-tier directors want to work with the guy.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Guillermo del Toro

In Telluride this year, clusters of people often gathered outside of theaters after screenings of Guillermo del Toro’s monster romance, The Shape of Water, as the warm and gregarious Mexican-American director engaged in impromptu Q&As with the crowd. Del Toro’s Cold War-set movie, in which a mute cleaning woman played by Sally Hawkins becomes intrigued by a sea creature, is about “falling in love with the other,” del Toro said. “The thing love and cinema have in common is that they are about seeing. The greatest act of love you can give to anyone is to see them exactly as they are.”

Alice Waters has been bringing her slow food message to Telluride since the 1970s, when her long-time friend, festival director Tom Luddy, first invited her. Waters also plans the menus for some festival events, and in the early years would fly in her own bread and vegetables. This year, Waters wanted to spread the message of one of Telluride’s most vivid documentaries, Eating Animals, based on the book by Jonathan Safran Foer about what it means to eat animals in an industrialized world. Produced by Natalie Portman and directed by Christopher Quinn,Eating Animals spoke to Waters’s passionate belief in the superiority of traditional farming methods. “We’re in the food underground and we have to connect with others and help each other be informed,” Waters said.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Michael Barker and Tom Bernard

Kings of the arthouse, Sony Pictures Classics co-presidents and co-founders Michael Barker and Tom Bernard are Telluride fixtures, who each year bring a mix of independent dramas, foreign language films, and Oscars contenders to the mountain festival, while casting an eye for new films to acquire. This year, Barker and Bernard brought the Annette Bening romance Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, the Chilean transgender drama A Fantastic Woman,Chloé Zhao’s heartland portrait The Rider, and the Russian family drama Loveless.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Chloé Zhao

During a first-day press orientation at Telluride, one notable critic declared Chloé Zhao’sThe Rider the best film of the year. (So far.) It’s high praise, and just may be true. Zhao’s intimate docu-drama follows a young rodeo rider as he suffers setback after punishing setback, all captured with a piercing insight and empathy. Zhao’s film earned plaudits at the Cannes Film Festival before screening in Telluride, where cowboy life is perhaps a bit more familiar. Acclaim arrived in Colorado as well, and Zhao’s film seems on track to be one of 2017’s most beloved arthouse darlings. Pretty good for a second-time director. Zhao is well worth keeping an eye on. We certainly will be.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Ted Hope, Jason Ropell, and Bob Berney

The studio is young, but the taste of the men who run it is timeless. Founded in late 2010, Amazon Studios has quickly established itself as a force in the independent-film world, thanks to movies like last year’s Oscar winners, Manchester by the Sea and The Salesman, and this summer’s breakout romantic comedy, The Big Sick.Jason Ropell, Amazon’s worldwide head of motion pictures; Ted Hope, its head of motion picture production; and Bob Berney, who runs marketing and distribution, came to Telluride this year to share their Todd Haynes film Wonderstruck, and the Ai Weiwei documentary, Human Flow. As for why Telluride is such an appealing place to bring a films, it’s the festival directors’ tastes, the abundance of Academy members who attend it, and one other factor, Hope says—“The altitude. The thin air makes every movie seem good.”

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Joe Wright and Anthony McCarten

Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Anthony McCarten are the brains behind Darkest Hour, the Winston Churchill drama starring Gary Oldman that lit up Telluride audiences with its portrait of strong leadership in a crisis. For Wright, the festival was a chance to connect with leaders of a different sort, like fellow directors Barry Jenkins and Greta Gerwig. “I am having the time of my life,” Wright said of his Telluride experience. “Directors work in isolation quite a lot and don’t get to meet other directors, so . . . to be here and be able to share horror stories or delight or just appreciation. It’s very emotional.”

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Errol Morris

One of the most celebrated documentarians working today, Telluride regular Errol Morris is not content to rest on his laurels. At this year’s festival, Morris debuted perhaps his most audacious work yet, a six-part documentary/reenactment hybrid called Wormwood. A knotty and riveting story about the mysterious death of a C.I.A. operative and his son’s decades-long quest to uncover the truth, Morris’s miniseries, set to debut on Netflix in December, mixes traditional documentary interviews with staged re-creations of events, done by actors Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, Tim Blake Nelson, and Jack O’Connell, among others. Though a five-hour screening is a lot to ask of busy festivalgoers, they nonetheless came in droves. The first marathon of Wormwood, which has earned rave reviews, played to a full house at Telluride’s premier venue, a 650-seat theater named after another hailed documentarian, Telluride mainstay Werner Herzog.

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

The cast of Hostiles

Where better to debut an epic Western than amid the mountainous grandeur of Telluride? Which is just what producer John Lesher and director Scott Cooper did with their film Hostiles, starring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, and Wes Studi. The film—about an Army captain escorting a Cheyenne chief across, er, hostile territory—was a rare Telluride film that arrived without a distributor. When rave reviews came pouring in, it quickly became a hot commodity. The film travels next to Toronto, where one assumes it will be snapped up and given a prestige release.

Justin Bishop

Ai Weiwei

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei enlisted crew members shooting footage in some 23 countries in order to make his documentary, Human Flow, about the staggering refugee crisis unfolding around the globe. It’s a cinematic journey that ultimately lead Ai to this mountain film festival, ahead of his movie’s October release by Amazon. Telluride often programs films with a global perspective like Ai’s. As festival director Julie Huntsinger said, “To be a good humanistic person, you have to . . . see how other people live.”

Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy

As the Telluride Film Festival’s directors, Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy are the hosts who set the Rocky Mountain event’s warm tone and high bar for cinema. During the year, they screen some 200 features for consideration on their tightly curated slate, mining for the film gems that will often surge to the front of the Oscar race. Luddy, who was among the festival’s original founders in 1974, walks the town as Telluride’s spiritual godfather. Huntsinger, who came aboard in 2007, manages a festival weekend staff of roughly 500 people, and endeavors to maintain the intimacy of the festival’s early years. “I was given the keys to this new, beautiful, very complex mansion,” Huntsinger said. “You take care of this, you look after it.”